The Collection
by SJlikeslists
Summary: This is a set of one shots that may someday be broadened out into longer stories. For now, they just are what they are.
1. 1 I Thought

AN - Do you remember when Parker and Jarod had a little conversation about how someone needed to handle the Lyle situation? Yeah, someone dropped the ball there.

Miss Parker, Jarod

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

_I Thought You Were Handling It_

She was pacing. It was a "tell" behavior, but it was never one that she had eradicated from her repertoire the way she had dismantled the other habits from her childhood and adolescence that gave away more than she was comfortable letting other people see (more than it was safe for her to let other people see). She was, most definitely, not about to put a halt to her behavior now. It was soothing - in a it was really keeping her blood pressure further elevated than it should be even though it was nice to burn off some of the restless energy kind of a way. She needed soothing. Besides, there was no one else around to see that she was pacing like some sort of a caged animal while she waited for him to make an appearance. It was entirely possible (and even likely) that he could see her - having some sort of surveillance up and running so that he could view her at his leisure before he actually made himself known would be such a him sort of a thing to do. He was a twitchy little lab rat after all.

As if there was any way that this was some sort of a trap from her side what with all of the hoops and last minutes changes and relocations that he had made her go through in order to make their little meet and greet happen. She was not sure whether to be insulted or flattered that he found her that much of a threat. This had nothing to do with the standard relationship of predator and prey that the two of them engaged in and nothing to do with the internal affairs of the Centre. What it had everything to do with was her misbegotten excuse for a brother and the fact that Jarod (Mr. High and Mighty I Have the Moral High Ground himself) seemingly could not be bothered to handle the situation.

Quite frankly, he was probably right to be a little cautious of her, but it was not for any of the reasons that would have occurred to him - he was incredibly short sighted for someone who owed his continued freedom to keeping one step ahead of those who were dedicated to finding him. He should be cautious about meeting her not because it might be some sort of a trap to bring him back to the Centre but because she was aggravated enough with his lack of definitive action that she might be willing to see whether losing a toe or two might provide proper motivation for him to actually get something done. She could not fantasize about her fall back threat of knee cap shooting as she had left her firearm behind, but she was still wearing heels that could be put to imaginative use.

Her pacing increased its speed and she found her hand resting against her abdomen applying pressure against the unease that was building up there. That was just what she needed - to have ulcers acting up when she needed to be focused on giving Jarod at the minimum a tongue lashing and possibly some pain induced motivation.

"The floor should be structurally sound enough for our purposes, but I'm not willing to make guarantees if you continue to attempt to wear a groove into the . . .," his voice trailed off as she spun hands going out of years of habit to draw her weapon before she remembered that she was not carrying one (as per the convoluted instructions that she had agreed to follow) and that aiming at him was not something that she was supposed to be doing right now even if she did have the means to do so.

"Jumpy?" He asked with one of those vaguely amused looks that never ceased to infuriate her - one would think that he had spent enough time out in the real world to know that his attitude issues were not something that the vast majority of the population would appreciate.

"Agitated," she replied giving him a glare that actually caused the hint of amusement in his expression to fade.

"You're the one who insisted this was necessary," he told her with a small shrug. "So, why don't you enlighten me about what was so important. If you think that sweepers are going to be able to sneak up on me just because . . .," the words disappeared as he caught sight of the expression on her face. That was good. She was not going to vouch for her temper if he continued with his flippancy. She was not actually going to vouch for her temper in any case, but an attempt at civility was going to be made.

"This is about Lyle," the expression on his face was suddenly mirroring the angry one that she could feel on her own. "We need to talk about . . .," he cut her off before she could elaborate.

"Why you haven't done anything?" He sneered crossing his arms and somehow managing to settle into an aggressive stance even as he leaned back against the wall. His eyes narrowed and his lip curled.

"Excuse me?" She demanded slipping into an aggressive posture of her own (so much for attempts at keeping this meeting civil).

"You heard me," he told her with that sneer in his voice still clearly present. "How long do you intend to dawdle over this before you do something?"

"Before I do something?" She questioned feeling a modicum of confusion creeping in on top of her knee jerk reaction of anger. He looked serious. He sounded serious, but he could not possibly be serious.

"We agreed that he had to be stopped," Jarod insisted. "You were supposed to handle it, yet he is still out there treating women as if they are a buffet waiting to be sampled." His hands flew out to his sides in an expressive gesture (an agitated one), and Parker pushed back a shudder at the mental image that his words conjured. She did not need to have that stuck in her head. She had far too many Lyle related images that would not leave her alone stuck in her head already.

"Back up there, genius," she bit back her desire to start yelling in the interest of trying to get the conversation turned around to a constructive end. If it were a question of any other topic, she would just let her irritation flow. That was not an option in this case. "What would possess you to think that I was handling it?" She might have managed to cover her irritation, but she had not been able to completely tap down the tone of disbelief.

"We said," he started in that petulant child tone he got sometimes when he was about to whine about something that he insisted was unfair. She was in no mood to listen to that.

"We said that someone had to stop him," she stated making it clear that he was not the only one with a solid recollection of their previous conversation. "Obviously, someone means you."

"Me?" He asked her as if she were making no sense.

"Yes, you," she answered (biting back the sarcasm that was begging to be unleashed).

"Why would you assume that someone meant me?" He sounded genuinely confused. Sometimes, she found herself wondering how he had managed to survive in the outside world. His lack of sense made itself glaringly apparent at the most inconvenient of times.

"Hello?" She could practically feel the derision (she simply did not have adequate motivation to hold it back any longer) dripping off the word but clueless still standing up against the wall might very well miss it completely with how dense he was being. "What are you scrambling around out here doing every day, Jarod?" A sudden craving for a cigarette hit her so hard that she nearly gasped out loud at the sensation. Reappearances of laid to rest addictions and an acting up ulcer - this was so not her day. "This is your life. This is what you do. Things like stopping Lyle are practically your bread and butter."

"Bread and butter?" He was doing the clueless thing again. She had never had any patience for that - not even when they had been children. The people around her were always telling her how utterly brilliant he was. Why could not utterly brilliant manage to engage enough of his brain to use context clues? "Why would I look at stopping Lyle as a dinner addition?"

"Don't go there!" She ordered. "Find a bookstore and buy an origin of phrases book - later, after you take care of Lyle."

"Why are you not taking care of Lyle?" He insisted sounding like a child who had become fixated on something and would not let it go.

"Jarod!"

"You're right there!" He yelled back. "You have open access! It only makes sense that you would be the one to handle things since you are the one who is already on site."

"You're the one with the saving people complex!" She growled back.

"You have to have a saving people complex to stop a serial killer who eats people?" His voice climbed up another few notches on the volume scale as he came off the wall and started stalking in her direction.

"The point is that you are the one who does these things!" She countered as her own volume increased in response. "Why aren't you doing it now?"

"I don't know," he said with his voice suddenly dropping to little more than a whisper as he came to a halt just a couple of steps away from her.

"What?" She asked fighting the sudden urge she had to take a step backwards. When the man in front of her had been loud and aggressive, she had been ready to meet him step for step and posturing for posturing. Now that he had gone quiet, she found her own impulse for confrontation bleeding out of her.

"I said I don't know," he repeated. "I don't have an answer for your question. When we said that one of us would have to stop him, I just assumed that it meant you would be the one doing the stopping."

"Well, I assumed, based on prior experience I will add, that that meant you."

"Interesting," he observed as an expression she could not quantify crossed his eyes.

"It isn't interesting!" She insisted feeling the agitation that was just under the surface for the entirety of their interaction bubbling up again. "Lyle being Lyle is not interesting." A flash of some of the things that she had seen that she was never going to be able to unsee made her next breath stutter as she exhaled.

"I was actually referring to . . .," Jarod began.

"I know what you were referring to," she brought his sentence to a halt.

"Then, why did you . . .," he sounded genuinely confused.

"Not the time for your social ineptness!" She did not want to hear it. She did not want to be in this broken down old warehouse that should have seen a wrecking ball a couple of decades ago. She did not want to be remembering pictures and police reports and the fact that that man had shared a womb with her. "Are we done here? You'll actually handle it this time?"

"When did we decide that?" He was pouting. He was actually standing in front of her pouting. How was it that he had not had more people threatening to kill him over the years than he had?

"Why are you being so difficult?" She took a step into his personal space and noted (pleased to do so) that his eyes shifted to the side as if making certain of his escape route. That was how it should be. There should always be a healthy dose of fear when people dealt with her. That way they would actually get the things done that they needed to get done instead of standing in the middle of some sort of B movie trapped in a crumbling building movie scene about to happen whining over whose turn it was to handle the situation at hand. "Don't answer that. You're always difficult. Just stop him." She ordered poking a finger into his chest. His eyes actually crossed as she pulled the poking finger up to point it directly between his eyes in a moment of threat before she dropped her hand back to her side.

"You know," he piped up as she turned to head for the door (how he had ended up standing there on the side of the room that the door was not on was not a question that she was going to bother to try to answer). "I could give you the same directive. Command. Whatever you want to call it."

"Dead people," she stated in the calmest, most detached voice she could muster as she slowly turned around to face him again.

"What?"

"There are dead people - I would say dead bodies, but we both know that there is not much in the way of a body left when Lyle is finished with someone," she elaborated. "There are people. Dead ones. And you want to get your nose out of joint because you don't like my tone?" She questioned with an eyebrow that she was certain had risen so far that it had disappeared into her hairline. "Newsflash. You never like my tone; I never like your tone. It does not matter. Lyle matters. Stopping Lyle matters. Are we on the same page?" She held up a hand to stop him before he could even try. She was half convinced that he could not possibly be as far out of it as he tried to appear. If she ever found out for certain that he did it on purpose to mess with her, she was going to find that precious case of DSAs of his and melt it down. "Don't. Are we clear that stopping Lyle needs to happen?"

She waited for his nod.

"Are we clear that you will be the one doing the stopping?" She prompted. There was going to be no more of this confusion over who was responsible for what.

"I have an idea." He said suddenly.

"Of course you do." She let the eye roll happen. Civil had not gotten her anywhere. There was no reason to keep up any pretense.

"We both want to stop Lyle." That, she found, required another eye roll.

"Have you been here for the rest of this conversation?" She snapped at him. Then, she looked at him - really looked at him and took a step back while shaking her head emphatically in the direction that signified that her answer was no. "I know that look," she told him with a sudden flash from their childhood superimposing itself over the grown up face in front of her. "I really hate that look. It's your I have a plan that I believe is stunningly brilliant because I'm Jarod and it never occurs to me that my plans are anything other than stunningly brilliant look. I do not want to see that look. I do not want anything to do with that look."

He always tried to throw it back at her that the trouble they had gotten into as children had been mostly instigated via her, but that was not the way that she remembered it. Syd could take his rose colored memories and shove them - Jarod had started his fair share of things as well.

"I do not have a look." He told her looking at her as if she had starting spouting some sort of crazy nonsense.

A memory hit her so hard that she could actually smell it (not that the smell had been remotely forgettable in the first place). There had been yelling and angry sweepers. There had been so many angry sweepers, and there had been the smell (and the fact that they would not let her go home and take a shower until after her father had gotten out of a late meeting in the tower). She shuddered. There was a reason that wheat grass was not allowed anywhere within her vicinity.

"Please," she shot at him. "You have the exact same look on your face that you did right before the nutritional supplement in the . . .," it was his turn to hold up a hand to stop her.

"You remember that?" He was looking at her strangely - sort of disbelieving and a little pleased and something else that she was not going to give a name.

"Focus!" She ordered instead shaking off memories that it would serve no purpose to revisit.

"We both know that Lyle needs to be stopped," he told her giving a small inclination of his head to demonstrate that he was acceding to her demand that they get the conversation back on track. "So, why don't we stop him together?"

Whatever response that he was expecting to get from her, she would be willing to wager that he had not expected her to laugh.


	2. 2 Internal Rambling

Lyle, his observations of Miss Parker

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

_Internal Rambling in the Life of Lyle_

He had pursued the whole personal reflection thing once - had tried to place meaning and draw out connections and map out in his head the whys and whats and hows of it all. It had not been a particularly satisfying experience. There had been ideas and theories in abundance, and he was reasonably confident that there could have been conclusions if he had continued to chase after the "what ifs" and "maybe I" paths that his reflection had constructed.

He had not bothered to take it that far - had not wanted to bother. It had been something he wanted to think about; he had considered it worth the effort and the disappointment and the frustration that was involved, and then he had not. The difference had been rather like a switch flipping, but that was a phenomenon with which he was intimately familiar by that point in time. He suspected (actually he knew with every ounce of confident certitude that he possessed) that if he ever bothered to go looking, then he would find that his obsession with figuring himself out (and the vague sense of wanting to fix it that had accompanied that time) coincided perfectly with Parker deciding to join (officially) the rank of staff at the Centre. It was really only logical that that was the case.

With one glaringly visible exception, the Centre functioned on the principle of pursuing the most potentially lucrative route possible. As much as a younger him would have wished to dismiss the seeming lack of logic involved in the occurrence, they did not spend all of that money on twin studies for no reason. It should have been disconcerting - the knowledge that he had gained of the intruder that he now understood had infiltrated his mind and emotions on so many occasions.

It was not. He had come to the point where he found it rather unremarkable. Besides, he knew very well that she would be more deeply disturbed by his presence in her psyche than he ever would by her is his. His sister was very high strung. He blamed her lack of constructive hobbies. He had been like that once. He had had the same level of frustration with his surroundings, but he had found a way to take control.

It was how they were wired - it did not matter how much she pretended that she did not know it. The two of them were not made to sit back and let the world happen. They were made to determine which way it turned. He really hoped that she would learn to accept that one day. He could only dream of what it would be like to have her there with him - understanding and knowing and having found her own route to control. The echo of his own contentment and sense of power in the place in the back of his mind that was always her would be a very heady thing indeed.

It was a pity that she was so obstinate, but he could not find it in himself to resent that. He was obstinate himself which he knew (even if she did not) should go without saying. They were eerily similar really. The manner in which they responded and the actions that they chose might differ greatly, but their thought processes and emotions and sense of themselves in relation to those around them were all fundamentally the same. How could they not be when there were so many occasions that he could look back and recognize that he really could not tell the difference between whose thoughts had been whose?

He need look no further than Raines for an affirmation of that knowledge. The two of them had been so unnaturally afraid of that man for so long. He had associated the man's visits in his head with an upswing in violence from Lyle Bowman. She had associated him with violence against their mother. It had been there in the back of both of their minds (no matter how much they had blocked it out) that that man's appearance meant pain.

They had fed off each other. They had felt each other's sense of unease without even realizing that the other existed, and the phobic reaction to Raines had been reinforced and strengthened until it became nearly inescapable.

Then, she had learned to see what he had done through the lens of adulthood instead of that of a frightened little girl. He had learned how to take control of life and cast out the thought that anyone was able to control or truly injure him, and they had both stood stronger for the reaffirmation of their new outlook on the matter being echoed by the connection that they had both still been unaware existed.

It had not escaped his notice that they had both made their initial incursions into their journey of who they would grow to be by leaving their best friend buried. He had literally done so; she had done it a little more figuratively. The comparison was valid just the same (and he could admit to being unclear on which of them he felt had been the kinder in the way that they had gone about it). He never voiced that to her. He kept most of his observations of their sameness to himself. As much as he enjoyed getting under her skin (and the nearly electric sizzling that buzzed in the back of his head when she was directing her ire at him), he knew how to bide his time. She was not ready to hear it. He had come to accept the fact that she might never be ready. He rolled with the details knowing that only the endgame mattered. She, well, she was still busy immersing herself in all of the details. He knew how to be patient (even though he did not always choose to employ that particular skill set - something else in which no objective observer could deny they were the same).

There were a lot of things that he did not say to her (he watched her and stored up the words to be spoken at a more appropriate time instead). Goading her, however, was generally fair game. Just because he knew that she might never get to where he would like her to be did not mean that he could not offer a little bit of pushing to herd her closer to that position. She might be the older sibling, but he was the brother. It might be antiquated of him, but he thought that made them equal on the looking out for each other scale - or would have if they had been left alone to grow up the way that siblings should.

He did not let that bother him either. There was a part of him that would always be a little sorry that all the possibilities of that life had never gotten the chance to be, but he had made his peace with the machinations that had pulled him out of that existence and onto a different path. He had made his peace with his early life with the Bowmans (although he doubted that that professed practitioner of psychiatry that trailed after his sister each day would agree with his method of reconciliation as having made "peace").

Ultimately, it was not worth getting worked up over - they had not really succeeded in separating the two of them after all. It had, he was confident, been less about separating him from his sister and more about separating him from his parents - they had wanted him isolated and beaten down and ready to jump at any way out that they offered him. Raines was a fool when it came to things like that. There were some things that outsiders could not sever no matter how hard they tried. There were some connections that could only be severed by the parties involved. For all of their study and professed understanding of human nature, the visible power players at the Centre did not seem to do much in the way of putting any of it into practice. The less visible power players were apparently more inclined to work with the flow than try to batter their way against it. That was his preference as well. It was part of how he knew that he would be one of them someday.

It was as clear as the path had become before him on the day that he had stopped fighting against and trying to understand and embraced what those who were uninitiated would have termed the darkness that had been waiting to welcome him. He had learned to trust it - it never let him down. It was not some philosophical monster prowling beyond the edge waiting to devour him; it was clarity in the same way that removing oneself from a city allowed you to fully appreciate the stars. Removing oneself from the confines of all the trappings of civilization allowed you to fully appreciate . . . other things - wonderful things. Clarity was a result of those wonderful things.

Everything about where he would end up was perfectly clear. It was just the rambling of the path that remained obscured. He did not mind. Life took you to plenty of interesting places if you let it happen. He could afford to bide his time. He could indulge in an appreciation of his journey. After all, he was a man with hobbies, and there was nothing stopping him from pampering himself with them at will. He might even share them with his twin one day - one way or another. That was an interesting thought - one that he would think about further later.

Right now, she was staring at him. It would look like glaring to anyone else, but he knew what she was really doing. She was studying him; she was trying to figure him out. She was, of course, going about that in all the wrong ways. If she really wanted answers, she would not find them written on his face (or by snooping in his private files or interviewing people from his past). When she really wanted to find answers, she would discover them in the back of her mind - in that little place that she was still pretending did not exist. She would find her answers in that little corner of her that was all him in the same way that there was a little corner of him that was all her.

He smiled at her, and he felt her instinctive internal jerk backwards that did not show anywhere on the outside. On the outside, she looked detached. Her facade was wasted on him. He could feel the inside - her agitation and wariness of him and her frustration in her failure to be able to fit him into whatever box she was trying out for size this week. He could sense the distrust and the disgust as well as the compulsion to solve him that reverberated underneath of it all. It was like the ocean in the midst of a storm - the way her emotions rolled and ebbed and flowed and came crashing up against him. She really was too tightly wound, but she made such a cute little kitten with all her hissing that was not backed up by anything because she had not yet learned how to use her claws.

He could teach her if she would let him. She just had to be ready to learn.


	3. 3 Debbie Sees It This Way

Debbie

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

_Debbie Sees It This Way_

She liked to hold the bunny. It was not her favorite thing about visiting the house, but she did do it every time that she went. She did enjoy it, so it was not as though she was lying when she gave that as her answer to the question of why it was that she kept wanting to go back. It was not as if she wanted to lie to her dad, but she did not know how to tell him all of the things that were going through her head. She chose the answer that was simple - she chose the one that did not make her dad look at her the way he did when he felt like she was missing something that he should have gotten for her.

She did not like it when he looked like that. Her dad was the best. She just wished, sometimes, that he could know that he was a great dad without it reminding him that he was only an okay mom. That was not his fault. He was about the best mom that a dad was capable of being, but that did not change the fact that there were some things that he was just too much of a dad about for the mom hat to be put on at the same time. She did not have a way to tell him that (one that did not end with him looking at her like he thought that he had let her down), so she stuck with things that were safe - things like bunnies that were fluffy and cute (and little girly enough that it let her dad hang on to his hope that she was still young enough to not notice all of the things that he would rather that she never notice).

Her dad could not come up with any single parent guilt about the fact that she liked bunnies. He had offered to buy her one of her own once, but she had declined. She had told him that she preferred to visit. Besides, there was a lot of traveling involved in that place where her dad worked, so Miss Parker's bunny was her responsibility often enough that having one of her own would probably be redundant.

Her dad chose not to ask any more questions about it after that. She was glad, and she suspected that he did not mind so much when her visits to play with the bunny ended with trips to go bra shopping. That was one of those occasions when being a dad kind of drowned out the necessity of being a mom. She figured that he would have stepped up if it had been necessary - he always stepped up when it was necessary - but putting themselves through the awkwardness of that trip was something that neither one of them was sad to have skipped over.

He was, however, not always so happy about the outcome of her shopping trips as he was to ditch the underwear part. He had kind of looked like he had swallowed his tongue the first time Miss Parker had bought her an entire outfit. There had been a lot of muttering about role models and imprinting and losing his hair and an early heart attack. She had not paid too much attention to all the things he was only half saying out loud at the time. She had been too busy reveling in how good it felt to stand there with her back straight and her hair out of her face and looking at the world as if it was not something that she needed to huddle away from in order to keep from getting hurt.

Miss Parker had taught her that, and she had managed it without any of the awkwardly worded pep talks that were supposed to make her feel better about things but never exactly worked the way that they were intended that she was used to getting. Her dad would not understand how she felt (just like he had not understood the outfit) - mostly, because she did not have a way to explain it that did not sound bad. She did not have to explain any of it to Miss Parker. Miss Parker already knew without her having to say anything.

Her dad was a great guy, but he was never going to know what it was like to be a little girl watching someone leave her. She had worried about that once - that she was always going to feel like someone else (her dad, because he was really the only one that she had had at the time) might go as well. Even though she knew that her dad was not like that, she could not always shake the fact that when she was very little she had thought those things about her mom as well. Those types of things snuck up on her at night when she could not sleep - or they used to do that.

They did not now. They could not manage to get hold of her the way that they had before she had learned how to drive them off before they swallowed her up and left her crying as softly as she could so that her dad would not hear her. She had a way to stop them. She would pull herself out of bed and go to her closet and look at the blouse and skirt hanging from the rod and remember what it felt like to stare down everything that scared her like it all should be scared of her instead.

She took trips back to Miss Parker's house. She played with the bunny. She went shopping. She asked shaky questions about why boys were dumb. She soaked up the way that Miss Parker showed all the scary things who was boss, and she learned to do the same - maybe not quite as well, but well enough that Miranda Davis never hid her math homework again, and Lyla Stuart never came within five feet of her if she could help it - let alone made comments about people who were not good enough for their mothers to bother to stick around.

Some people were worth letting in and bothering about, and some people had already been given their chances and needed to be clued in to the fact that they were no longer worthy of her further notice. She knew that her dad would not like that she thought that way. He did not see it from the same perspective, but he was not a girl navigating the minefield that was middle school. She was glad for that. She did not think he would have made it out unscathed.

She, of course, was not nearly as smooth about it as Miss Parker was, but the other woman had been practicing for a lot more years. Still, it worked well enough when she needed it to work. Besides, Debbie was absolutely convinced that no one could ever pull it off as well as Miss Parker did without the heels. The heels, she was certain, were a foundational key to the whole thing, but she did not ask for those - not even on shopping trip days. She did not really like it when her dad started muttering about heart attacks after all.


	4. 4 Because He Can

Angelo

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

_Because He Can_

They could not stop him. They had never been able to stop him - not really. He might not be able to vocalize what he was thinking. He might not be able to get the thoughts out and form them into the type of words that could make their way from his brain to his mouth and have his tongue shape them so that the air pushed out and the waves rose up and fled to the harbor of the ears of others where they could be taken in and compiled for meaning and comprehended. That did not mean that the thoughts were not there. They were there. They were always there. They were just mostly trapped. Then, they sort of bounced back and forth in his head as they looked for a way out. When they did not find one, they kept bouncing until they ran into other thoughts that could also not escape. The collisions jumbled the thoughts together and broke off pieces and melded them onto other places where they did not belong until everything was convoluted and tangled and could not be comprehended by others even if they did find a way out. That was what happened to thoughts that were supposed to be spoken and were not.

What happened to the words that people spoke that had no ears to catch them was something he found himself thinking about as he hovered behind a grate and watched the oblivious telling what they thought were secrets people sitting around the table below him. Did they go on forever and ever bouncing around the world because they had not managed to serve their purpose? The words that no one heard he meant - not the people who did not bother to look up and notice that he was watching them.

They never bothered to look up and notice that he was watching them. They never did much in the way of looking up at all. That was a shame for them. They did not know what they were missing.

He was not particularly quiet when he crawled his way around the tunnels of vents that had been his preference since he was small enough that they had been rather more comfortable to navigate than they were now. He never let the discomfort make him give them up - they were his. They had always been his. Sometimes, he chose to share them, but he kept them mostly to himself.

He had thought to offer their sanctuary to the little girl when first she came, but he had never gotten around to making the offer. The other daughter (the grown up one) had gotten to her first. She had taken her under her wing and taught her how to weave the type of sanctuary that you carried with you wherever you went in your glare and your posture and the way you made your hair fly when you spun around instead of the type that you had to physically enter.

Little girl liked daughter. Daughter liked little girl. Neither of them ever said it out loud, but he could hear it. They had both followed their fathers to this place, but one was still waiting for the type of recognition that the other received every day. She knew when he was watching - sometimes. She did not always notice. She liked to make herself not notice many things and the awareness of when he was watching was one of them. He remembered when she learned to not notice. He remembered when she first pretended that she did not know. He remembered hiding and listening to her refusal to answer the angry voice that demanded that she tell where she had seen him.

That had been long ago. It had been before they had realized what they had done. They never said it out loud, but they knew that they could not stop him just as well as he did. They had bent him and broken him some and made him into something different, but if they had been different people (ones who listened a little more to the things they did not want to hear), then they would have already known that that never works out the way that you plan.

They had taken him and kept him and then turned him into something that it was impossible for them to keep. He could walk out any time he wanted. He could go to any place that he wanted (and he had done it from time to time), but he liked his vents. He liked watching the people in the building who had such grand thoughts and such narrow purposes. He liked sneaking up on her and waiting for the spike of irritation that came from her when she realized he was there.

He liked the way her feelings chased themselves around as she pushed away the inclination to climb into the vents after him and leave behind everything that stopped at the edge of the grate. He liked the way that she got annoyed with herself (which she always displayed by barking at the others as if they were the ones who made her mad instead of her being mad at herself). It was fun to watch. It was fun to feel.

She had always been fun. He had been so lost at the start when he had not yet figured out how out of their ability to touch him he was. She had always had a spark of defiance about her that helped him center what he wanted to be. It was like the feeling that the man in the office on the third floor came in with on Mondays that he always called being high.

Today, however, he thought he might leave. He might follow the vents to the outside. He might go out and stand in the sun. He might walk into the town and climb on a bus. He might just go wherever it took him and soak in the emotions of the people on a beach somewhere or sliding down the side of a mountain. Yes, he decided. He would go outside and find his way to a mountain with snow. He had not played in the snow for a very long time (and he liked the snow). He liked the way it shifted and molded and was always changing into something new. He wanted to go play. He wanted to leave the familiarity for a while and be somewhere and do something that did not match the pattern of his life. There was a word that other people used for what it was that he was feeling. Someone close by was thinking it. He just had to pull it to him. Vacation. That was what he wanted - a vacation in the snow.

He would be taking a vacation in the snow, and he would not be going alone. A smile that would have made Raines proud pulled across his features. No, he would not be going on his vacation alone. Other people did not go on vacation alone. They took their friends. They took their families. He would do the same. It would be easy enough to get them there. He already knew which strings to pull and which messages to send. After they got there, there would be yelling. He knew that. He was okay with that. Yelling was something that he was used to hearing. They would get the yelling out of their systems. Then, they would all play in the snow. They would have a vacation. He would have a vacation. He would have company with him - just like he used to have before they let themselves get confused.


	5. 5 Visit

AN - I do not trust either of Jarod's parents. Why? Reasons.

Miss Parker, unexpected guest, set just after the train explosion with Ethan

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

_Visit_

She eased her fashionably tight, designer jacket off her aching shoulders with a barely audible wince. If ever there was a time to have a sense of regret over her taste in clothing, now would be that time. She still was not entirely certain how she had managed to finagle herself into the jacket in the first place, but an image to be upheld was an image to be upheld. That was one of the first rules of survival in her world. If she was nothing else, she was still a survivor. That, at least, was not something that had changed.

She gave the fabric in her hands a couple of shakes to knock off the excess water (making a show of ignoring the spasm of pain that it sent through her to do so even though she was the only one around to know) before depositing it in the closet. The jacket might be ruined - it had been made for visual effect and not for protection from the weather. She would figure that out later. She let her hand rest against the closed closet door to help her keep her balance as she divested herself of her shoes. Her body protested the effort that these actions required, but she ignored the discomfort. She did not have much of a choice. If she favored every part of her body that was in pain, she would not be moving at all. That was, she supposed, the consequence of being within the blast zone of a bomb when time ran out. Jumping from the train would not exactly have been a bruise free endeavor on its own – adding in the force of the explosion itself and whatever it was that she had been knocked into (she was a little fuzzy headed when it came to that part) made her current condition that much more unpleasant.

The doctor at the hospital had wanted her to stay for a few extra days, but she had declined (firmly, with maybe just a little bit of yelling and the slightest touch of name calling). She hated hospitals (even if this visit had not involved a psych ward). Her father had suggested that she spend a few days in the infirmary on SL-20. She had very nearly snorted her disbelief at the audacity of that one. He had displayed the good sense to not repeat the suggestion.

Sydney had offered to drive her home when the overly cautious doctor had finally, reluctantly approved her release (as if she would not have simply checked herself out AMA if he had not given in), and she had actually been tempted to consent to the offer of help. If it had been Broots doing the offering, she would have accepted the proposition. She had, however, not been up to chancing the car ride with Sydney. The ride home would have been filled with endless wondering about Jarod's safety and condition. She was not in the mood to listen to his angst ridden pondering. She would have ended up making some snarky comment over the fact that his body not being found was a fairly clear indication that Syd's precious little lab rat was not dead, and she just was not up for starting another of the never ending rounds of Sydney's disappointment at her lack of emotional empathy for others.

She rolled her eyes at the thought. Sometimes, she found herself wondering just what kind of information Sydney had hidden away somewhere that kept him so safe and secure within his position at the Centre. There had to be something. Sydney's overt displays of "emotional empathy" would have gotten any other individual killed long before now. There were also those pesky little shooting and bomb setting incidents. Oh yeah, Syd had something on someone. It was something really big and really good, and it was something on someone very, very important.

She shook off the direction in which her mind was traveling. Syd could take care of himself. Jarod could take care of himself. Just because they both lost their heads at times and acted like they did not have a bit of sense between them did not change the fact that they were both capable. She was worried over Ethan. He had better be with Jarod, and Jarod had better be taking excellent care of their baby brother. Otherwise, that long discussed bullet in his kneecap was going to become a very painful part of his reality.

She considered going for the scotch (she was sure that she had some squirreled away somewhere), but she vetoed the idea given the pain killers she had been consuming. She was not going to chance it. If Ethan called, she wanted to be conscious (and coherent). She had not made the world's best first impression, and she was going to have to rectify that. Besides, it would be too much trouble to go dig out the bottle from whatever place it was hiding.

She slowly slid herself into a chair and listened to the sound of the rain pelting the windows. The problem with remaining conscious was that it left far too much time for thinking. She had not had much time for that since this whole debacle with Ethan had begun. Her thoughts flitted to her mother, and she briefly reconsidered her decision regarding the scotch. She did not want to think about her mother. She might never want to think about her mother again.

It was not new – this feeling of having been abandoned. She had gone through it all before. She had spent her adolescent years coping with the fact that her mother had been sick, weak, or whatever the thoughts had played to on any given day. It did not really matter. What mattered was that no matter how much she had believed that her mother had loved her, she had not (in the end) loved her enough to stay with her.

Finding out that her mother had been murdered was heart wrenching, but it was also uplifting in some ways. It was as if a huge cloud had been removed from its position overshadowing her existence. Her mother had not wanted to leave her. She had been taken. She had been forced. She had not had any choice in abandoning her little girl.

That had become her new reality, and it had woken something up within her – something that had been dormant for far too long. There were questions to ask, and they were important enough to risk the asking. It had given her a drive; it had given her a focus. She had a purpose that refused to let her settle for the safe little niche she had carved out for herself within the confines of her father's world. It was scary and dangerous and worth every bit of it because at the end of it all she would know. She had clung to that concept of knowing - she had let it drown out so many other things. It had become a centerpiece of her existence.

Well, she knew now, didn't she?

She was being forced into a new reality again. This one was much less pleasant. It was even worse than the original reality. There were no excuses of mental illness or even a personality flaw rendering her mother incapable of coping with pressure and stress. She had been left behind because there were other things that were more important to her mother than she herself was. She was almost grateful for the lies she had been fed in her childhood. They had been kinder than the truth.

Mama had even brought her with her that day. She had chosen a time when she knew that she was close enough to hear. She had to have known that she would see. Didn't she know how that image would stick with her? Didn't she know how that day would haunt her? Had she even cared? She had trusted their futures to Raines. Maybe she had been mentally ill after all. There was no other good explanation for that level of stupidity.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of someone knocking at the kitchen door. The kitchen door? No one used the kitchen door. Her heart gave a little lurch as she fought her way back to her feet. Why would he be bringing Ethan here? Someone might be watching. Was something wrong? She made her way to the back of the house as quickly as she could and felt her fingers fumbling over the locks that prevented her from pulling it open.

Why did she have so many blasted locks? It was not as though they ever actually kept anyone out of her house. She did not even think to push aside the curtain and look before jerking the door open. She did not need to as she knew who would be on the other side. Only this time, she was wrong.

Well, she was sort of wrong. It was not Jarod with their younger brother in tow. It was the boy. He was, of course, older than when she had last seen him (and taller with it). He was also completely and utterly sopping wet. His hair was plastered down against his forehead, but his eyes remained uncovered. She would always recognize him, she realized, because of those eyes. She knew them better than her own. They haunted her, and now they were looking into hers with an expression that could only be described as pleading.

"Miss Parker?" He asked in a whisper. "Please? I don't have anywhere else to go."


	6. 6 Best Laid Plans

Sydney

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

_Best Laid Plans_

What did someone have to do to get a ticket to Africa out of this place? Other people did not seem to have any problem. Other people got sent. Other people spent months there being all retrained or brainwashed or whatever it was being done there by whoever it was that was hiding out behind the scenes in that facility that no one was allowed to know the exact location of (even after they had been there).

Had it seriously not occurred to any single person in a position to make the call that he was likely a highly eligible candidate for a little bit of reeducation? Normal incidents of subordination every day that carried on for years upon end did not seem to attract their attention. Blatant disregard for directives did not bring so much as a head turn in his direction. What was he doing wrong?

If there was a single person in any sublevel or upper level office of the building who did not know that he was communicating with Jarod on a regular basis, then it was because said person was being deliberately obtuse. A few snide comments might be sent his way, but they never had any backing. No one ever actually did anything about it. Why was that?

He had shot Raines's oxygen tank once to no avail. A little internal investigation for the purpose of showing that they were having a little internal investigation had occurred, and the whole thing had been swept under the proverbial rug in what seemed to be some sort of giant shrug of the shoulders followed by a "what can you do?"

They could ship him to the facility in Africa - that is what they could do. They did not. They never even made any preliminary moves in that direction. It was like he had some sort of "do not engage" order hanging over his head that made the others steer around his indiscretions instead of directly confronting them and him.

Quite frankly he was at his wit's end. If the massive destruction involved in the bombing had not gotten him packed off, then he was starting to think that there was some sort of bubble around him that prevented the powers that be from seeing his actions clearly. He had played along, of course, and done all the lip service about being just as in the dark as the others, but he had not ever expected it to work. He had not wanted it to work. It was not supposed to work, but he could not very well run around flailing his arms around yelling about how much he wanted to make the trip because he had business to discuss with those in charge.

If he did not know any better, he would think that the Triumvirate knew exactly what it was that he was angling for and were preventing him from getting it just to watch him squirm. It would be exactly like them. He had to do something. He was out of ideas. He needed something big. He needed something so big that they could not find any way to ignore it. He needed something so big that it would be dangerous to them to continue to ignore it. The problem was that he had absolutely no idea what it was that that something so big might be.

How did one top that level of property damage or even attempted murder?

Raines had not had any problem getting a trip out. What had he done that was so much more difficult to ignore than what he had? It, quite frankly, made no sense.

Sydney found himself very discouraged by the whole thing. The constant lack of response was very wearing. He had actually found himself doodling out a plan that involved rocket launchers and a small army of mercenaries, but he had, ultimately, dismissed that as completely unpractical. He certainly did not know where to go about getting hold of any rocket launchers and as much as he enjoyed the mental fantasy of both Mr. Parker and Raines being walked off a plank from one of the tower office windows while he donned an eye patch and stood on the roof announcing himself as Sydney the Pirate King who had conquered the island nation of Centre, there was a distinct possibility that Jarod would have him spirited away to be committed before the Triumvirate made it there to retrieve him. That was a pity - it was quite nice as far as revenge fantasies went. But, he also reminded himself, mercenaries were notoriously unreliable.

He shook off his mental planning session and got back to the matter at hand. It was about time to intercede before Miss Parker once again reduced their computer tech to tears. It was a bit tedious - the repetitive behavior of her lashing out at the closest sniffling target. Although, the chronic dismissiveness of his attempts to be recommended for an in person correction session had become quite tedious as well. Most of his life was tedious these days. He needed to settle on a next plan and put it into motion. Even if it did not end up serving his larger attention drawing purpose, it would, at the very least, liven things up for a little while. He needed that.

So, what all had he not yet tried that he had not already dismissed due to logistics? He needed a bigger, better plan, and he needed it yesterday.


End file.
